Human Statue (Jessie)
Taxter & Spengemann | New York
September 8 – October 22, 2011
Taxter & Spengemann is pleased to present Human Statue (Jessie) an exhibition by New York based artist Frank Benson. A graduate of UCLA's MFA sculpture program, this will be the artist's second solo exhibition at Taxter & Spengemann. The show consists of a single artwork, which shares the title of the exhibition.
Human Statue (Jessie) 2011, depicts a woman in a designer dress and sunglasses holding a pose, which mirrors the shape of a vase at her feet. Though it does not have a direct art historical antecedent, the sculpture in its entirety harks back to classical figurative works, while the subject’s contemporary dress and angular pose clearly place the piece in the present. This interplay of modernity and classicism was reflected in the work’s realization: it was designed digitally using photographic scans of the model, New York based dancer and musician, Jessie Gold, and then painstakingly fabricated directly from the 3D digital model into a traditional sculptural material, bronze. Human Statue (Jessie) follows a hyper-realistic sculpture of a nude male, Human Statue, 2005–2009, but departs from the trompe l’oeil exactitude of this earlier work, giving primary emphasis to the overall form of the sculpture and the natural color of its material. The entire sculpture has been rendered in a light-colored bronze approximating the model’s flesh, but the dress and plinth on which the figure stands has been painted a deep black that recalls the color of the original source elements replicated in bronze. The sunglasses have been CNC milled from solid bronze and the vase has been cast directly from an existing ceramic vessel.
The technology used to make the sculpture was not just a means to an end: it was integral to the conception of the work. The cold, mechanical data capture, and the precise, physical fabrication employed to create the piece, informed the rigid, geometry of the model's pose. This harmonious relationship between subject and process, allows the piece to achieve a conceptual purity that elegantly combines the artist's long-standing interest in mechanical reproduction, and discrete objecthood. The sculpture blends the aesthetic influence of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner with the technical achievement of James Cameron’s Avatar to create an unconventional depiction of a young woman, which is uncanny in its detail and anonymous in its formalism. Neither an allegorical figure, nor a simple portrait of the model, here the human body is an armature for a sculpture, which is, at its core, a formal abstraction.